Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”

October 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have been anticipating the rollout of the Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG on the IBM i platform ever since IBM previewed a code assistant for the System z mainframe platform in August 2023 to help COBOL shops port their applications to Java on the mainframe. And lo and behold, the Rochester team followed suit, but with a slightly different approach, creating a Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG, which was also created using IBM’s homegrown “Granite” large language models.

Well, apparently, forget all of that. At the TechExchange 2025 developer conference last week, IBM was showing off a new, unified …